progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
Spencer was well known for his views on psychology, sociology, biology, and especially
the views on Darwinism and individualism. For Spencer all of life, all of existence was a
continually evolving process. The author continually returns to that fact in all of its
aspects.
Spencer was well read from the time he started to write through the 1930s. Then he was
attacked unjustly by the left wing in American academia, centered at the time at
Columbia University, a hotbed of Communists and Marxists. For it was in the mid 1940s
that Spencer was vilified by the one-time Communist history professor at Columbia
University, one Richard Hofstadter.
Hofstadter in his book Social Darwinism uses Spencer's ideas on Darwin in a somewhat
self serving and twisted manner to attack both Spencer and the free market capitalism as
it evolved over the century from 1850 to 1950. Hofstadter was well known in leftist
circles as one who could readily take a few apparently disconnected points and with what
could be at best described as shabby research methods produce polemics against the
conservatives and right wing advocates in the body politic.
Hofstadter was also well know to write "soft" history, what we would expect in a New
Republic piece, rather than hard academic history. Hofstadter was polemical in his style
and greatly deficient in primary sources. He was all too often just a recorder of old press
clippings using these as the window to the world he wanted the reader to see rather than
addressing the reality via primary sources.
In a recent work by Prof. T. Leonard at Princeton University (See Origins of the Myth of
Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in
American Thought 39 ) Prof. Leonard states about Hofstadter and Spencer the following,
while reviewing the issues in "Social Darwinism in American Thought", also called
"SDAT":
"Richard Hofstadter, like many New York intellectuals in the 1930s, embraced radical
reform. He joined Columbia University’s Communist Party unit for a brief period in
1938. The more mature Hofstadter grew disenchanted with radical politics, indeed came
to see it as hostile to scholarship. But SDAT, which revised his doctoral dissertation
published in 1939, preserves Hofstadter’s earlier world view, that of a precocious
scholar, still much influenced by his mentors, Merle Curti and Charles Beard, who could
say to close friends, “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it” … SDAT also
bears the historiographic imprint of Beard’s “rule” that historical interpretation must
assume that “changes in the structure of social ideas wait on general changes in
economic and social life” ... SDAT is thus sprinkled with unadorned Beardian claims,
such as “Herbert Spencer and his philosophy were products of English Industrialism”…"
39 See http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Myth.pdf
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